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Brief September 23, 2026

Building the Great American Grid 

Five themes to accelerate interconnection, expand and optimize transmission, and plan for next-generation technologies — laying the groundwork for building the Great American Grid.

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The US grid faces a crucial test.

The United States faces a pivotal test for its electric grid: load is rising faster than the system can add generation and transmission, and timelines for major transmission projects can exceed seven years from planning to operation.

Reliable, affordable, and abundant electricity is increasingly foundational to the nation’s economic growth, national security, and technological leadership, making grid expansion and modernization a national priority. Utilities now forecast 166 GW of peak demand growth over the next five years, up from 24 GW in 2022, with much of that growth concentrated in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic, regions that are already facing capacity constraints and high prices.

In response, grid operators, market participants, and policymakers are pursuing reforms to connect new load and generation faster and to expand transmission where it is most urgently needed. To help identify practical, high-impact solutions that can scale across regions, RMI, JPMorganChase, and several co-hosts convened nearly 200 unique voices through four regional forums and one federal forum. Together, these discussions surfaced five themes (see table below) centering on accelerating interconnection, expanding and optimizing transmission, and planning for next-generation technologies — laying the groundwork for building the Great American Grid.

Regional and national convenings revealed priority reforms to enable efficient grid expansion.

Following the five regional and national events, five overarching themes emerged that set the stage for scaling what is already working and putting innovative ideas into action to reliably and cost-effectively expand the grid.

US Regional and National Themes

ThemesLearnings from 2026 convenings
Building more regional and interregional transmission, and faster, can help mitigate rising electricity rates and maintain reliability. It does this by connecting customers to the most cost-effective generation resources across a wider geographic footprint, and by increasing the grid’s resilience to localized disruptions, like wildfire and extreme weather events.
  • Transmission expansion at speed is near impossible without planning and permitting reforms due to federal, regional, state, and local process barriers.
  • ERCOT and smaller regions in the West offer exceptions. With engaged state leadership and relatively rapid permitting, Texas is building both system-wide and local transmission projects, supercharging its ability to serve growing load and add generation at speed and scale.
  • Among multi-state regions, MISO has emerged as a leader in proactive, collaborative transmission planning, helping enable new generation development while managing costs. MISO and SPP’s joint targeted interconnection queue (JTIQ) initiative provides a model for collaboratively managing the interface between regions.
  • Despite some progress, regional transmission plans remain insufficient to fully meet surging load growth. Cost allocation between states and between large loads and other rate payers, as well as process disparities, persist and must be resolved.
  • Grid operators are not planning adequate interregional transmission. They lack a viable planning process, have no requirement to plan, and undervalue interregional reliability benefits.
  • Federal action to address cost allocation, accelerate permitting, and create a venue for interregional planning would accelerate needed transmission expansion and reduce electricity generation costs.
Streamlined permitting and interconnection processes for transmission, generation, and load can help safeguard electricity rates and reliability while supporting American industry competitiveness.
  • MISO and SPP are speeding interconnection studies through stronger readiness requirements, tighter study discipline, and improved study tools.
  • SPP recently implemented its conditional high impact large load service (CHILLS) and high impact large load generation assessment (HILLGA) pathways to cut wait times for interconnection study results to 90 days while protecting transmission system reliability and enabling loads to bring new generation.
  • Software solutions are helping accelerate regional planning and interconnection processes, including MISO's adoption of advanced interconnection analysis tools and PJM's collaboration with Tapestry's AI platform to improve planning and scenario analysis. RTO leadership can unlock the benefits of these technologies and process modernizations across other regions as well.
Demand-side and distributed energy solutions — load flexibility, co-located generation, virtual power plants (VPPs), and bring-your-own resources pathways — can enable faster, reliable growth.
  • Data center customers are increasingly willing to support grid reliability by enabling their facilities to flex their electricity consumption, especially during peak events. However, some grid operators and utilities do not offer a clear pathway for them to implement these solutions. Importantly, they need to define, and ideally standardize, the rules and processes governing how large electricity customers provide demand flexibility or bring generation and storage to serve their own load.
  • Fortunately, large electricity customers, utilities, and regulators are proposing new market and tariff structures that accommodate growing electricity demand while maintaining system reliability, including bring-your-own-resources tariffs that allow or require large electricity customers to help plan and fund generation to serve their facilities.
  • New research and technologies are emerging that enable loads to reduce demand from the bulk power system using VPPs, behind-the-meter storage and generation, and more sophisticated process scheduling. These solutions should be deployed at greater scale through a combination of grid operator and utility leadership to develop clear implementation pathways in partnership with large customers and technology providers.
  • Co-located battery storage brings flexibility, reliability, and grid support that diesel backup cannot provide on its own. Deployments in PJM and ERCOT demonstrate how these resources can support the dual directives of growth and reliability, which could benefit other regions as well.
Advanced transmission technologies (ATTs) can immediately unlock more capacity from the existing grid, enabling faster, more cost-effective expansion while new lines, generators, and substations are being planned and constructed.
  • Load growth is outpacing the grid's ability to add generation and transmission capacity, underscoring the need for both near-term solutions and longer-term system modernization.
  • Globally, ATTs — which include dynamic line ratings, high-performance conductors, transmission topology optimization, and power flow control — have proven their ability to move more power through the existing transmission system and increase the capacity of newly built lines. But existing business models, which favor new capital projects and do not reward utilization or efficiency, impede ATT expansion.
  • We can unlock ATTs by empowering regulators to request utilities to incorporate them in planning, advancing federal legislation that effectively incentivize ATT adoption, and exploring innovative utility business models. For example, new large customers could partner with utilities to support the deployment of ATTs to decongest capacity on existing lines. Congress has also introduced legislation aimed at incentivizing the adoption of these technologies, signaling growing support for policies that improve utilization of existing grid infrastructure.
This is a pivotal moment to leverage private capital to accelerate grid expansion and deliver broad public benefits.
  • To meet surging load growth, protect against more severe weather, and upgrade aging infrastructure, we must invest faster than our existing planning processes and cost allocation negotiations were designed for.
  • New industries are expressing willingness to “pay their fair share” for grid investments and protect existing ratepayers if doing so enables them to connect more quickly. However, existing planning and cost allocation frameworks provide no clear pathway for them to do so.
  • Private capital and innovative funding vehicles can help jumpstart grid investment and prevent disproportionate costs from burdening other ratepayers. This funding could support scaling technologies, such as geothermal generation and ATTs, or upgrading aging or vulnerable infrastructure. Grid operators must also fairly incorporate private capital funds into existing planning and cost-allocation frameworks.

What it will take to build a strong and enduring Great American Grid.

Momentum to modernize the grid is real and it’s showing up in concrete state and regional action.

Earlier this year, governors from 11 western states signed a bipartisan agreement that (1) endorsed the results from the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition’s (WestTEC’s) 10-year transmission study and (2) created the Permitting Alignment and Coordination Task Force (PACT) to help expedite transmission permitting across the regions. This effort demonstrates the growing urgency of grid modernization and the important role that state leaders can play in advancing infrastructure upgrades, hardening for extreme weather, and meeting rising electricity demand.

Grid operators are also demonstrating that meaningful progress is possible. SPP and MISO, for example, have taken steps to plan interregional transmission and accelerate study processes for new large loads and generation to power them, providing examples that can be adapted and scaled elsewhere.

Grid expansion faces many challenges, including earning community support. Many infrastructure benefits, including reliability, economic development, and lower energy costs over time, are poorly understood outside the energy industry while adverse impacts of infrastructure are tangible and visible. To build at the needed speed, grid operators, developers, and large load customers must still engage local communities early, ensure local communities benefit from projects, and provide needed context and education.

Federally, Congress and agencies can seize the opportunity, make needed reforms, and scale what is working. Congress, FERC, the Department of Energy, and other agencies are working to reform permitting, support intra- and inter-regional transmission expansion, modernize interconnection processes, and encourage adoption of advanced transmission technologies. To address the challenges in the way of building the Great American Grid, we need a durable coalition of leaders to ensure that new and in-process reforms and legislation succeed.

The Great American Grid coalition is made possible through generous support from JPMorganChase.

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